NewsOne contributor Bakari Kitwana will be going on the road for his sixth annual Rap Sessions tour. The tour, which started in 2005, will be headlined by a diverse panel of scholars and activists.
The series of townhall meetings will focus on themes “From Precious to For Colored Girls” and how these representations affect perceptions of Blacks in today’s national culture.
“In the brief two years following the 2008 election—from racially divisive political advertisements to the mainstream news media’s treatment of Black public figures—the Black image in American popular culture has suffered a serious setback,” says Bakari Kitwana, Executive Director of Rap Sessions and author of The Hip-Hop Generation. “We hope to answer the question, do popular images of Blacks in American media advance or distract from progress on the public policy issues facing the Black community? Equally important, how do such perceptions undermine coalition building across longtime racial and ideological divides?
For more information about Rap Sessions, log onto: http://www.rapsessions.org
The tour stops are as follow:
February
17th; Syracuse, NY
March
2nd; Providence, RI
TBA; Boston, MA
April
25th; Champaign, IL
26th; Chicago, IL
27th; Madison, WI
